A Couple at a Crossroads: How to Build?

My wife, Julia, and I are fast approaching the end of an internship that involves building a straw bale house in Moab, Utah, with the nonprofit Community Rebuilds. We took this four-month volunteer position to gain experience in constructing someone else’s affordable green home before beginning to build our own on land Julia’s family owns near Woodstock, N.Y.

Until recently, however, we’ve both been conspicuously avoiding talking seriously about our building plan. Julia and I don’t necessarily agree on what kind of home we want, or how to make it happen, and we know it.

We’ve heard that building a home involves making thousands of decisions and that building a home with your spouse means having to come to an agreement on most of them. Owner-builder how-to guides note that more than a few marriages have broken up in the process, which is the last thing we want.

Our first disagreement is over size. I grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, while Julia grew up in a sizable house in Woodstock that her parents expanded over the years.
My instinct is to build small because it will be cheaper and more manageable to do by ourselves. I don’t want building a house to make us lifelong slaves to debt, and I dream of building one step at a time without taking a bank loan.

Small also appeals because it’s more environmentally responsible: Fewer materials, less of a footprint on the land, and less energy to heat and cool.

Julia’s instinct is to build a home that we and the two children we hope to have can live in comfortably. It’s important to her that the kids ultimately each have their own rooms, and that we include a spare bedroom that doubles as an office. She’d like a bathroom for us, one for the kids and a half-bath off the living room.

I want to build small and manageable at first, then add space in the future to suit our needs.

Julia would rather take longer to build one house once. Even though it will cost more up front, she argues, it will ultimately cost less to go through the construction process only one time and then be done with it. She is not afraid of debt and wants to take advantage of the low interest rates available these days.

Because her parents went through multiple home renovations of their house as she grew up in it, she knows what it’s like to live in a construction site and does not look forward to doing it again.

Lastly, and probably accurately, she says we will probably have our first child, and maybe even our second, by the time the house is finished.

Another sticking point for us is what kind of home we build. Before we came out to Moab to learn straw bale construction, we spent some time touring other owner-built green homes in upstate New York. In the process, we stumbled across three different wooden kit homes purchased from FirstDay Cottages.

Exposed wood covered the interior space, giving it a warm, natural, cozy feeling. Two of the kit homes had a vaulted ceiling design that gave Julia and me the impression we were in the hull of an old ship.

The kit homes were made almost entirely of real wood from New Hampshire, with no plywood, particleboard or drywall. My priority is to build from a relatively local (the wood would be shipped less than 200 miles to Woodstock), sustainable material, and Julia’s is to live in a home without gassing chemicals or formaldehyde in the walls. The FirstDay Cottages accomplish both.

These affordable 960- to 1,840-square-foot homes are designed to be built by owners with no construction experience.

We visited a college professor, his wife and their two kids. Over the course of a year or two, they built an entire two-story 1,400-square-foot home with radiant floor heating, hiring only a local high school student to help on the weekends. I don’t recall exactly how much they said it cost, but it was in the neighborhood of $100,000.

The passive solar design and insulation were so good that on the day we visited it was nearly freezing outside and they hadn’t needed to turn on the heating system. Julia and I were both impressed.

But as our straw bale building experience in Moab has progressed, I have leaned away from wanting a kit house mainly because it takes much of the creativity out of the house design process. It limits the possibilities at precisely the time I am being introduced to all kinds of creative ideas about natural building from the straw bale community, an inherently experimental crowd.

For Julia, however, the expanding range of possibilities for our home has had the opposite effect. She worries that too many options will mean we never make choices and move forward. She embraces the idea of a kit house to make this enormous undertaking more manageable.

Also, now that we are deep into plastering, the most labor-intensive part of straw bale construction, Julia has decided she doesn’t really enjoy it that much. She prefers the mathematical precision of carpentry over the mysterious alchemy of mixing natural plasters and the subjective artistry of applying it to a wall.

I like the sustainable design underpinning straw bale construction; namely, using local, cheap and abundant natural building materials to make a super-insulated energy-efficient home. I also like the look and feel of a finished straw bale house. So, perhaps bullheadedly, I’ve approached plastering as a challenge to be conquered, no matter the odds.

While these differences have floated to the surface, we’ve also begun finding common ground.

Kelly Ray Mathews, a straw bale builder from Durango, Colo., who is our plaster instructor, offered up an old adage from the building trades.

“You can build fast. You can build cheap. You can build well. Pick two,” he said. With lots of money, you can hire professionals to build a quality house quickly. Otherwise, either settle for rapid but shoddy work, or take your time and figure out ways to build well on the cheap.

Julia and I agree that cheap and well-built is the path we are shooting for.

One Saturday, our building instructor, Eric Plourde, led us on a tour of several owner-built straw bale homes around Moab to get a feel for different design possibilities.

Tom Noce spent seven years building his. One reason it took so long was that his eclectic yet remarkably tasteful interior was cobbled together by combing Craigslist year after year in search of just the right used doors, countertops, tile, etc.

Julia and I think the long-term hunt for used and salvaged building materials is a great idea. It saves money, and building with recycled stuff is inherently green.

We also visited Michelle Wiley’s straw bale home. Aside from framing, she did most of the rest of the work herself, including building benches, platforms and shelves and creating all sorts of artful details out of cobb covered in earthen plaster. It wouldn’t be too difficult for us to add similar details to our home for next to nothing.

Our last stop was Ranna Bieschke’s straw bale home. One wing had an exposed post-and-beam structural system. Julia and I loved the way these beautiful hunks of wood looked next to the plaster walls. Perhaps we could mill some of the trees on our land into posts for our home.

Faced with the evidence of successful owner-built homes, after the tour Julia and I began to believe we might actually be able to do it ourselves.

One day we were getting ready to leaving the construction site after a long day when we struck up a conversation with Kelly, the straw bale builder from Colorado, about our house-building worries. He commiserated with us, having built his own home with his wife.

“Never try to build your dream home,” Kelly said. He has seen many of his clients’ dreams shattered by the difficulty and expense of building, even if the end result is a perfectly nice house. Relationships get frayed in the process, he said.

Kelly advised us to think of the project as a job and not a lifestyle, avoiding the common trap of feeling like you need to be working on your house every waking hour. “My wife and I took vacations from our house,” he said.

Come up with a simple, workable design, he said, do the best you can, and enjoy the process, knowing that neither of you will get all that you want out of it.

After Julia strolled away, he leaned toward me and said with a grin, “And do yourself a favor, just let her pick the colors.”
Earlier versions of this post and the caption below misspelled the surname of the plastering instructor advising volunteers for Community Rebuilds. He is Kelly Ray Mathews, not Matthews.

Rob HarrisKelly Ray Mathews, a plastering instructor, worked into the night on finish details for the Community Rebuilds straw bale house.

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